Quote:
any restaurant tends to be less healthy than eating at home

I disagree. Sure, any diner or whatever is likely to use "bad" ingredients, but nicer places don't. Then again, if you're eating French food, that's like 90% butter anyway. At the same time, a reasonably nice restaurant is going to be using more fresh foods instead of stuff that's full of hydrogenated oils, which are used because of their long shelf life. The stuff you eat at home isn't going to be any better. In fact, because I'm such a lousy cook, most of the stuff I eat at home is prepackaged crap, which is probably worse or just as bad as fast food. But even if I were to cook at home, I'd probably use the same grease, butter, and oils the restaurants would. I mean, I'm not sure how you prepare eggs, toast, and hashbrowns, but I can't imagine that the butter you fry your eggs in or the butter you put on your toast is any different than the butter that your diner uses. The only difference I can see is that one or the other of you use margarine instead, which is just bad in a slightly different way than butter. It's not like using more makes it more greasy, mostly. If you use too much, it just sits on the grill waiting for the next short-order item. (We're not talking about deep-frying here, and even if we were, the temperature of the oil has much, much, more to do with the level of oil left in the cooked food than the "amount" of oil used to cook in does.)

So unless you boil or bake all of your food, you're not getting any less grease than at a restaurant. (Of course, since you're a vegetarian, the chances of you doing just that is probably dramatically increased.)

My point is that anything in excess is bad, and the excess most to blame is calories. Restaurants simply serve too much food in the US and we as a culture have to learn to stop eating. Stop going to the all-you-can-gorge buffets. Eat half your entree. Eat more lower-calorie-per-volume foods. Stop ordering a diet Coke with your 12 pound steak and stop slathering pure fat and sugar on top of your salads and pretending it's not bad for you.

I just don't think that restaurant food in and of itself is as bad for you as you claim. Nicer restaurants aren't death traps. They make food as well as you can make it at home. And, sure, a greasy spoon is likely to be worse for you. There is marginally more grease there than a nicer place. But that grease also lets your body know that it's full. If we'd listen to our bodies instead of letting culture tell us that we need to clean that plate, we'd be less fat. And I'm guilty of it, too.
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Bitt Faulk